Strength, love, art, politics:

40 Years of Forced Entertainment

Online, by invitation only. 

Sunday 10th November 2024 at 7pm (UK time)

               From left: Claire Marshall, Terry O'Connor, Robin Arthur, Tim Etchells, Cathy Naden and Richard Lowden.

               Photographed by Hugo Glendinning

Forced Entertainment formed in Sheffield in 1984 and since that time has established itself as a unique, challenging and inspiring institution in the British and European independent theatre scenes. Settling as a collective of six artists led by writer and director Tim Etchells, the group’s performances take a wide range of approaches to the task of reinventing theatre for the late 20th and early 21st Centuries. They are equally at home causing trouble in large-scale group pieces complete with guest performers and musicians, as they are creating subversive and intimate text performances, improvised marathon works of 2 to 24 hours and giddy online experiments.

At a recent event marking the group’s 40th anniversary artistic director Tim Etchells spoke about “... the arrow we have drawn, the distress flare we have shot into the sky, the marker we have placed - for artist-led initiatives, for collective making, collective decision making, collective authorship.  For a theatre that brings in energy, ideas and influence from art, from stand-up, from music, from popular culture, from performance, from many other places. For work made in the studio not on the page. For ambiguity, For difficulty. Against realism, because as we often liked to remind people, the real is too important to be left to the realists. Against a narrow definition of politics. For poetry. For the live, relational and constantly unfolding moment of theatre and performance. For its space of individual and collective encounter. For all this. The doors we and others have opened, and will continue to open."

Strength, love, art, politics: Forty years of Forced Entertainment will be a 90-minute mix of live readings by the company from texts used in performances across four decades, alongside video clips and conversations. Interspersed will be presentations by a special selected group of artists, performance makers and writers who hold the company and it’s work dear,  presenting personal reflections, memories, observations and readings inspired by the group’s work over 4 decades. Includes contributions from Tim Etchells and Forced Entertainment, Jennifer Hodgson, M John Harrison, Lois Keidan, Ocean Stefan Chillingworth, Laura Hopkins, Tanuja Amarasuriya, Lara Pawson, Lesley Ewen and others.

https://www.forcedentertainment.com/

                               

 

Kirsten Mosher: American artist

Sunday 27th October at 7pm (UK time)

NB this is the day British Summer Time ends so the clocks go back one hour from 2am on Sunday morning. Please don't forget, or you'll be way too early! 

If you're not on the guest list and would like to join us please leave your full names and email address at the bottom of this page.

Kirsten Mosher: American Artist

Kirsten Mosher is an artist and writer living in Massachusetts. Her chapbook Zero (minutes to) Home was published by Selektion in 2021, and her chapbook Plea$e Steal Me for 100 Plus Dollar-zz published by Lily Poetry Review Books, 2023. She is published in Ellipsis Zine, the Bath Flash Fiction Anthology, 2021, Sonder Magazine, Issue VII 2023, Minor Literature[s], 2024 and in Exacting Clam, Spring Issue 2024 among others. 

She is engaged in video, writing, studio work and art in public places and is currently working toward an exhibit at Frac Pays de La Loire in Carquefou, Nantes, France scheduled to open in November 2024. 

Her installation Soul Mate 180° for which she received the LACMA Art+Technology Award was exhibited at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 2020. 

Mosher has been showing her work nationally and internationally since the late 1980s, at venues such as the Venice Biennale Aperto, 1993; Villa Arson, Nice, France in 1994; the Museum of Modern Art, 1997; and with the Public Art Fund, NYC in 1998; and the Villa Merkel, Bahnwarterhaus in 1999. Lacma commissioned work for the exhibition A is for Zebra, in 2011, and the MUSAC in Leon, Spain commissioned work and published her series of Gumhead books in 2011.

Mosher has lectured, conducted professional development workshops, and created publications, and worked as an art educator at institutions such as Dia Art Foundation, LA County Museum, C.C.S. Bard College, Boston Center for the Arts, and Ecole Nationale des Beaux Arts de Lyon, France.

This evening's programme will offer a unique preview of new work made for this forthcoming show, and will include readings by Stephanie Elleyne, short films and examples of other work by the artist.

We'll also be joined by the American poet Chris Agee who will be reading from and discussing his epic poem Trump Rant (The Irish Pages Press, 2021).

Caustically humorous and polemically compulsive, Trump Rant is a work of meticulous political portraiture: a deep-delving and epoch-spanning investigation into the nature of power in American life, made luminous by Chris Agee’s nuanced, exploratory understanding of authoritarian drift and thwarted democratic aspiration in a number of world-historical contexts, from Belfast to the Balkans to the formerly Confederate South. Free-roaming in its breadth of reference and tonal range, the Rant is at once viscerally personal and unsettlingly resonant, infused throughout with an almost hypnotic sense of scale, largesse, and historical moment.

  

You can order Trump Rant from the publisher here https://irishpages.org/product/trump-rant/?v=79cba1185463. 

By entering coupon code TGF10 at checkout, members of the audience will receive an exclusive 10% discount off the RRP, valid until 30^th November.

kirstenmosher.com  @kirstenmosher